“That’s what we don’t know. Dano is going to have to find out the hard way, layer by layer. I told him to take plenty of C-4 and some big shaped charges.”
Erik’s intel work didn’t make me feel any better as I hung around all alone by the telephone. An idle mind soon decides to amuse itself with mischief, and I remembered I owed Captain Patel a rocket for missing the Hispanic mercs, not that they’d done the Zanies a lot of good anyway. I rang him up on the intercom and told him to report to my desk.
He soon came waddling up, wearing a sheepish grin. That didn’t tell me much, since it was his usual expression. “How’s your Spanish today, fat boy?” I inquired.
“Non-existant, sir. Where I grew up, we spoke to the servants in Bengali.”
“How did you let a big one like that get by you?”
“To be honest, sir, we figured that if it was in Spanish, it couldn’t be of much military significance. I don’t think Spain’s won a battle since the Thirty Years War. Plus, I’ve had virtually all our assets chasing something else.”
“What?”
“Medusa.”
“What’s Medusa?”
'”It is something discussed at the highest levels of the Azanian government and military, and only at those levels. Beyond that we don’t know, except that as the war has turned to shit for them the word has turned up with increasing frequency. Since early this morning, there have been intensive discussions between the Zany state house in Berkeley and the fusion center on whether to use Medusa or not.”
“That suggests it’s some sort of weapon.”
“Clearly. But we don’t know what sort. So far, we haven’t found the key word that gets us into the file.”
“Have you tried Perseus?”
“What’s Perseus?”
“God save us from data dinks! Perseus is the Greek who slew Medusa. Didn’t you study mythology?”
“Sure, the Bhagavad-Gita.”
“Multiculturalism strikes again, eh? Don’t worry, it won’t last more than one generation in the Northern Confederation. Your kids will learn about Greeks and Romans, not Ganesh and Kali.”
“I’d hope so. Remember, my family didn’t go to all the trouble of leaving India because we liked the place. If my kids want to experience their ancestral culture, they can go out in the back yard, take off all their clothes, sit in the dirt and starve.”
“Okay, then I guess we’ll let you stay. Meanwhile, try Perseus on the Medusa file. And Patel–next time you catch some Spanish on the net, don’t assume it’s always someone trying to sell their mother.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
After Captain Patel headed back to his infernal machine, I kept thinking about the password. Perseus seemed less likely the more I considered it. Not only was it obvious to any educated person, but Perseus was a man and a bunch of feminist banshees wouldn’t be likely to use a man as a key to a woman.
But if not Perseus, what? Maybe a suitably feminist word that sounded like Perseus? I began doodling on a notepad: Persia, pussy–nope, scratch that one–percale, Percival–feminists should like men named Percival–Percheron–definitely too masculine–percolate–too domestic – persecute–what women complain of yet do, cuts too close to home–persiflage–women were good at that–persimmon–sour enough for this lot–persnickety–too appropriate–personality–few feminists had one–purse.
Purse. Perfect. The one thing no woman could do without and no man could comprehend. Nor find anything in.
Patel had secured his computers and their pencil-necked geek operators in a shaft off the main mine. I sauntered over with my notepad. The sign in front of his department read “Nerd’s Nest.” Humor was always a good sign in a military outfit, as its absence was a warning. “Here, try these,” I said, dumping the pad on his keyboard. “Start with purse.”
The roly-poly little captain’s fingers flew over his keys and buttons as weird signs blinked on the hideous orange screen. Real men prefer steam, I thought to myself. After a few minutes of blinking and beeping, he said, “No go. Doesn’t work.”
“Try the plural.” Perseus/purses. It was a closer homonym, and lesbians ought to go for homonyms.
More stroking of the machine. This time, it took longer. “Hm,” Patel said. “It’s not rejecting it right up front like it did everything else. That may or may not mean something. Let me play with this one for a while.”
“Okay, buzz me at my desk if you come up with something. I’d rather get away from your computers while I can still father children.”
“It’s microwaves that affect that, not computers,” Patel shot back. “And you can still have girls.”
“How reassuring,” I replied
Back at my improvised soldier’s desk, I found no word from Ron. That left me facing a strong temptation, one that beguiles every commander: the temptation, when idle, to interfere in his subordinates’ business. I could start asking for reports from the battle groups in the passes, briefs from the staff, “information,” that late 20th century soma. Instead, I remembered again von Rundsted’s reaction when he learned the Allies had landed on the beaches of Normandy: he went out into the garden and trimmed the roses.
I rummaged in my pack and dug out a volume of Xenophon. Xenophon was the perfect travelling companion: he was always a delight to read, and no matter how many times you went through him, you always found something new. I put my feet up on my desk, lit a cigar, and got lost in Athens.
A few minutes after 17:00 the phone on my desk rang. “Sir, we’ve got Sergeant Danielov on the horn,” the Mormon Legion commo said.
“Put him through,” I replied. At least he was still alive. The next voice was Ron's. “We’re in. The ruse worked. All the aircraft made it in. It’s a go!”
“Are you in the building?”
“Yes. We’re down to the third level. The fusion center is gone. It’s out of action for good.
“Casualties?”
“Just three dead, from booby traps. Eleven wounded. The booby traps are the only real problem. The Dykes got on their bikes and ran as soon as we started pouring out of the aircraft. The people in the fusion center were all women, so there was no organized resistance. We’ve got a lot of POWs.”
“Have you hit bottom in the building yet?”
“Negative. There is at least one more level down. We don’t know what’s there, or who. We’ve already rounded up the whole Azanian command and staff.”
At that moment Patel came flying up to my desk, panting from the short run through the mine. “Sir, sir, we’ve cracked it! We’re into the Medusa file! It’s not–”
“Hold on, Patel, I’ve got Danielov on the line.”
“No sir! He has to know this! Medusa is right under him!”
“Hold on, Dano,” I said into the phone. “What do you mean?” I asked Patel.
“Medusa is in the fusion center, sir,” Patel answered. “It's in a bunker in the basement. The spec op is going to hit it, sir.”
“What is Medusa, Captain?”
“A Q-bomb, sir. A doomsday device. It’s every nuclear weapon the Azanians could get their hands on, all tied together to go off at once. It’s at least 1000 megatons, sir. If it blows, the whole of North America is going to get bathed in radiation. It’ll be worse than 1000 Chernobyl’s. And the Zanies’ email has told whoever is in charge of it to set it off if the bunker is breached.”
Shit, I thought. It was the mother of all booby traps. Just like women to want to take everyone else with them.
“Dano, listen closely,” I said into the phone. “We just found out what is in the lowest level of the fusion center. It’s a nuclear doomsday device. Stop your operation! Repeat, stop your operation!”
Silence on the other end of the line. Please, Jesus, don’t let the comm go down now. “Ron, do you read me?”
“I read you,” he said. “OK, we’ll stop where we are. But then what do we do?”
“You hold tight 'til I get there. You said you have POWs, incl
uding the top Azanian military leaders. Start interrogating them. Tell them we know about Medusa. Some of them probably aren’t looking forward to being vaporized. Get out of them everything you can, especially anything on how the device is triggered.”
“Roger. All right, we’ll get to work on the prisoners and otherwise hold tight. How soon can you get here?”
“I don’t know. But for God’s sake and the future of this continent, don’t press on any further. Wait for me.”
“Roger, we’ll wait. Out here.”
We had a couple Blackhawks fueled and ready to go, waiting under cammo nets just outside our mine. Even at the operational level of war, you never know when you’ll need to get someplace in a hurry. We’d be a grape for any Zany fighter or SAM, but war is dangerous, even war against women.
The helo crews were hanging around the mine’s entrance in typical lounge lizard aviator fashion. I ordered them to get one bird ready to leave for San Francisco in three minutes. Then I yelled for Patel.
“Are you still seeing email flow from the Medusa bunker to the Zany government?” I asked as he came scurrying over.
“Yes,” he answered. “In fact, we’re hacking some right now.”
That told me Medusa was controlled by people, not by some automatic mechanism. Somebody was still down there with it. I wasn't sure whether that made the problem easier or harder.
“Okay, here’s what I need from you. Try to break in to the net and give the bunker good news: fake reports that we are retreating, plans by their Air Force for new strikes, rumors that the Mexicans are about to intervene to help them, that sort of stuff. So long as the folks minding the bomb think they have a chance to win, they’re not likely to set it off. Do you know enough of their codes to do that?”
“They aren’t using code,” Patel replied. “They are so confident in their electronic security that everything’s in plain English, or at least in politically correct English, which isn’t too hard to figure out once you realize words like ‘peace,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘justice’ mean their opposites. We haven’t tried breaking into the nets yet, but I think we can do it.”
“If you can’t, you’ll probably be heading back to India, because this continent will be uninhabitable.”
“That’s motivating enough.”
“Get on it now!”
“Aye, aye, sir.” As he ran off on his fat little legs, Patel was grinning. Like all good officers, he enjoyed a challenge.
As I walked out of the mine toward the Blackhawk, I saw two birds, not one, with their rotors spooling up. “We don’t need the second bird,” I yelled to the cockpit as I got into the nearest one. “It’s just me you've got. We Yankees don’t go much for entourages.”
“The other bird’s a decoy, sir,” the captain in the pilot’s seat shouted back. “If we’re intercepted, he’ll try to draw the enemy off on him.”
The helos were from the Montana Air Guard. As usual, the Guardsmen had both brains and guts. I gave a thumbs up and buckled myself in, and we were on our way.
The FLIVO with my headquarters was in on the plan, and he diverted two F-16s to provide close escort in. It turned out we didn’t need them. With the fusion center down, the Zanies were paralyzed. That’s one of the problems with centralized control. When it goes down, everything just stops. Whatever initiative and adaptability the Azanian pilots might have had was long since drilled out of them.
The SAM and AAA threat worried me more than fighters. We countered as best we could, flying nap-of-the-earth and letting the other Blackhawk lead. If he took fire, we could break. Again the precaution proved unnecessary. It was clear that the whole Azanian military was down. I hoped that whoever was minding Medusa didn’t know that. A lot was riding on Patel.
Helos are slow, and the sun was hanging just above the Pacific Ocean when we touched down at San Francisco International Airport, right next to the still-smoking fusion center. Dano ran out from the blown entrance toward the helos and met me just beyond our bird’s rotor blade.
“What's the situation?” I asked without preliminaries. A line from an old Tom Lehrer song came to mind: “We’ll all go together if we go, in one great incandescent glow.”
“We got the fires out quickly and kept the noise and commotion down, so whoever’s on the final level or levels thinks the assault is over. They may think we don’t know they are there.”
“What have you gotten out of the POWs?”
“We know who's down there with the bomb.”
“Who?”
“Lt. Col. Molly Malone, Azanian Air Force.”
“One woman?”
“Just one woman.”
What a dumb move, I thought. The first thing a soldier learns is never send anyone out alone.
“What do we know about her?”
“A lot. According to the POWs, she was selected because she is an absolute fanatic. A ‘feminist’s feminist,’ an ‘ultra,’ were some of the terms the POWs used. One even called her a ‘Lady Macbeth’, which was apparently intended as a compliment. She was disappointed in love early in her life and has hated men ever since.”
“I’ve always suspected that being disappointed in love was the origin of most feminism,” I replied. “At least she’s not a lesbian.”
“There’s more. One of our troops is the man who disappointed her.”
“What! How? Is she from New England?”
“Nope. But I brought along half-a-dozen of the Azanian exiles. They’re all former cops with SWAT backgrounds. I figured they’d know enough at least not to get in our way, and having someone with local knowledge might prove useful. Turns out I figured right this time.”
“Where is this guy?”
“Right here.”
Standing just inside the blasted, smoke-blackened entrance to the Azanian fusion center was a somewhat overweight, 40ish guy in gray utilities and high-tech boots, typical cop gear.
“Captain Rumford, this is Sergeant Willy O’Toole of the Sacramento Police Department. Willy, Captain Rumford is Chief of the Northern Confederation General Staff.”
“Pleased to meet you, Willy,” I said. “So you know the broad downstairs who is sitting on the Q-bomb?”
“Yes, sir,” Willy replied.
“How well?”
“Pretty well, sir. We were in love.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Twenty years, sir.”
“It’s a remarkable coincidence that you just happen to be here now.”
“It’s not a coincidence, sir. I knew Molly was a senior officer in the Azanian military, sir. When I heard a special op was being put together to go after the Azanian headquarters, I thought she might be there. I thought I might have a chance to get her out alive. So I signed up.”
“And now she’s all set to blow up a continent because you left her at the altar? I hope to God she doesn’t find out you’re here, or she’ll push the button for sure.”
“I don’t think so, sir. It wasn’t like that. It didn’t happen that way.”
“Why don’t you tell me how it did happen?”
“Yes, sir. Molly grew up a few houses down from where my family lived, in a typical Sacramento suburban neighborhood. We were kids together, played together, went to school together. From pretty early on, we knew we liked each other. By high school, it was more than like. We knew we were in love.”
“My dad was a cop, and I always knew I would be a cop. That was fine with Molly. But not with her mom. Molly’s mom—her dad had split just after she was born—was a schoolteacher. She bought into all the political correctness stuff and ran the sensitivity training sessions at the high school. She was a big-time feminist. And she hated cops.”
“And Molly had to choose between you and her mom?”
“Yes, sir. Her mom was all she had growing up, and she was real close to her. All through college, Molly and I still hoped to get married. But when I graduated and came home and joined the Sacramento Police Academy, her mom said she had to
choose between her and me. She chose her. She told me she had to, because otherwise her mom would have no one and I could always find another woman. But I never did.”
“Did she find someone else?”
“No, sir. After she broke off our engagement, she dove into all the feminist stuff with her mom. She hadn’t been like that before. I guess she figured that if she couldn’t have a normal life, she might as well go all the way into a weird one. I saw her name in the paper a lot, promoting abortion, leading demonstrations and so on. She became the local head of Planned Parenthood, then got elected to the State Assembly about the time the country was breaking up.
“Have you had any contact with her since she dumped you?”
“No, sir.”
“But you still love her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Does she still love you?”
“I don’t know.”
Well, as Stan would have said, this was a fine kettle of fish. We were sitting on top of 1000 megatons of nuclear weapons with the former boyfriend of the trigger woman, who might still love him or might hate his guts. All that was at stake was the ability of the North American continent to support life for the next thousand years.
“OK, Willy, I want you to stay right here with me. Dano, have you got comm with my headquarters?”
“Yes.”
“Get Patel on the horn.”
It took about thirty seconds for Patel to waddle over to the comm center. His PT was a cake a day.
“Patel, were you able to get the good news into the Zany fusion center?”
“Yes, sir. We blocked everything from all the other sources and have been feeding our stuff in. It’s tough coming up with ways the Zanies could be winning, but we’ve done our best.”
“OK, stay on the line,” I turned to Danielov. “Do we have any voice comm with Lt. Col. Malone?”
“We might. There’s an intercom right outside the vault door leading to the lower levels. We haven’t blasted there, so it’s intact. I don’t know whether it works.”
“Willy and I will go find out. Meanwhile, get your wirehead to rig a land line to this radio so I can still talk to Patel.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The cop and I headed into the fusion center and down, climbing through the usual wreckage of war. It was reassuring to see that in a contest between computers and hand grenades, grenades still came out on top.